Solitude and Hope: Y'all Come Visit!

There is a Rouault woodcut print (obtained many years ago) hanging in the living room area of my home. It appears to be representative of Rouault's early religious artistic work. Out of curiousity this afternoon, I was attempting to learn more details about it. Of course, that is a barren, superficial explanation of my interest.

More than idle curiousity, the motivation probably had more to do with some wish to reach out for something transcending the more mundane details and demands of everyday life (to the realm of "faith" or "belief"). Put more directly, the wish was probably a type of avoidance, escape, fantasy or retreat to some form of creative imaginagion. Alas..I could find nothing about the woodcut on the internet.

The print has a large, shadowed picture of Christ's face in the middle, and a face looking at him on each side. Those faces look somewhat menacing, or at least deathly skeletal. The style is similar to prints from both Rouault's "Passion" and "Misere" series.

The closest suggestion to what this print looks like is the one pictured above. This Rouault print is a lithograph fronticepiece for a book of prose by Marcel Arland, published in 1931 (as a limited edition of 216 copies). It is, to the best that I could discern, an untitled work.

For biographic notes on Georges Rouault, as well as examples of his work, please visit: http://wwar.com/masters/r/rouault-georges.html/